Mostly Mindful

Perennial Wisdom

September 2, 2016. Looking at a photo taken yesterday, feeling a bit like the feather landed in an alien terrain. Seems our world becomes daily more regimented, restrictive, brittle. Perhaps what’s needed is a softening of perspectives? Perhaps a poem?

April 14, 2016. In a recent workshop with John Fox (Mr. Poetic Medicine) and Mirabai Starr (Mystic), we practiced the poetic therapy of reading a poem several times and then writing a personal response – a new poem perhaps tied to the one read, and perhaps off on some diverse tangent. In other settings, I am practiced in reading poetry ala Lectio Divina – three times (for phrases that resonate; then for feelings engendered; finally for meaning to the listener). Mirabai shared her father’s emphasis on reading poems three times which struck me as a beautiful description of Lectio: First reading, you are knocking on the poem’s door. Second reading, you open that door. Third reading, you enter the room of the poem.

A few days after that workshop, I sat with a friend and David Wagoner’s poem “Getting There”. We read it to one another – knocking, opening, entering – and then wrote. This poem emerged, stemming from Wagoner’s reference to cheek against sandstone – which took me back to Lake Powell on the Arizona/Utah border. Tall red sandstone cliffs rise from bright blue water under blue skies. Tour boats take you past row upon row of what look like ancient women in robes, shoulder-to-shoulder. I’ve been there twice, and both times had the sense of being called to by cliff voices. This image is from 2007.

You can read David Wagoner’s poem “Getting There” here: www.ayearofbeinghere.com/2014/08/david-wagoner-getting-there.html

Go here for more on poetry therapy: http://www.poeticmedicine.com/

Go here for more on Mirabai Starr’s many contributions: http://mirabaistarr.com/

March 16, 2016. The weather is perfect for being out-of-the-house. But I’m inside, waiting for A/C repairs to complete. Sitting. Carried away by assorted sounds and associated visions. So often difficult to distinguish the real from the imagined. How splendidly the two tangle! Suddenly I am “seeing” the fringe on the altar at Red Corral Ranch – noticing the gaps between clumps.

June 17, 2015. I’ve been working on a reflection paper for a class I’m taking, studying perennial wisdom. The paper has prompted me to dig out a pendant presented at the completion of another class several years back. This poem insisted on interrupting my work on the paper! I’ll get back to that paper shortly. Meanwhile, I’ve created a collage of the front and edge of the pendant that stimulated the poem. A welcome synchonicity opened up along with this morning’s email containing the Pema Chodron quote that fit so well with the poem I had thought I finished last night. Here are all the pieces, coming together.